Program Preview, May 2013
Our May concerts present two string quartets from the past—Haydn’s Op. 64, No. 2 in B minor, and Smetana’s second string quartet—as well as the world premiere of a brand-new one, Gernot Wolfgang’s String Theory. Though from the standard repertoire, the other two are not well-known. Smetana’s first string quartet is often performed and is deservedly popular. And Haydn wrote so many string quartets—68 in all—that it is relatively easy to hear each one as if it is newly-discovered.
Born in 1824, Bedrich Smetana is one of the most celebrated composers of his native Bohemia (today part of the Czech Republic). His music evokes folk songs, dances, and the Bohemian landscape, especially in the tone poem The Moldau, the orchestral pieces of Ma Vlast (My Country), and in his first string quartet, “From My Life” (1876).
Smetana’s only three chamber works were all inspired by real incidents in his life. The first, the Piano Trio in G Minor (1855), was written in reaction to the death at age four of his musically-gifted daughter.
About “From My Life,” known for its subjective nature and its use of a program, Smetana said, “I wanted to depict in music the course of my life … The composition is almost only a private one and so purposely written for four instruments which, as in a small circle of friends, talk among themselves about what has oppressed me so significantly.”
Smetana’s second string quartet, which we are performing on our May concerts, was composed in his final years, when, as a consequence of his worsening state of health and loss of hearing, he was able to compose only sporadically. Commentators have observed that it is characterized by a density of musical expression that looks forward to impending artistic tendencies. The impact was such that Arnold Schoenberg is reported to have said that the second quartet “opened the world to him.” In 1883, after the first non-public performance of the quartet took place, Smetana suffered a complete mental breakdown; hospitalized the following year, he died in an insane asylum shortly after his sixtieth birthday.
Hungarian Johann Tost was principal second violin in the Esterházy orchestra, of which Franz Josef Haydn (1732-1809) was music director. Tost left Esterházy in 1788 to freelance in Paris, and Haydn sent six quartets with him, hoping that Tost would find a publisher for them. Tost was successful, and they were published in Paris as the Op. 54 and Op. 55 quartets. In 1790, the year that Haydn first visited London, he composed another set of six. Around this time Tost returned from Paris, married a housekeeper at Esterházy, and subsequently prospered as a cloth merchant in Vienna. There, in 1791, he also found a publisher for Haydn’s new set of string quartets, which were published as Op. 64 and which Haydn gratefully dedicated to him. Tost continued to play the violin and commission chamber works, whose performances in aristocratic homes provided an entrée for wealthy customers of his cloth business. He is considered to be the dedicatee (composto per un amatore ongarese) of the last two of Mozart’s string quintets.
Because Haydn wrote 68 string quartets, essentially inventing the ensemble early in his career and then writing for it throughout his long professional life, they form a seemingly bottomless well of musical treasures. Over our 27 seasons, Pacific Serenades has performed nine of those, each one so different from the others that they suggest a possible lifelong pursuit of getting to know them all. We seem never to get tired of hearing them, and our performers always love playing them.
